After the Trauma the Battle Begins: Post Trauma Healing by Nigel W. Mumford

Author:Nigel W. Mumford [W. D. Mumford, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781614680994
Publisher: BookBaby

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Children of the Holocaust: The Power of the Perpetrator

“And to them will I give in my house

and within my walls a memorial and

a name (a “yad vashem”) … that

shall not be cut off.”

Isaiah 56: 5

A happy heart makes the face cheerful,

but heartache crushes the spirit.

Proverbs 15:13

In appreciation of God’s healing in her life through prayer, Betty Hanerman sent me on a trip to the Holy Land. I went there with several other pilgrims from Scotland in 1998. She gave me a gift for my soul, a trip that changed my life. I walked where Jesus walked and stood near the place Jesus had proclaimed (Luke 4:18-19),“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” I was privileged to read those very words to our group, in the same location where Christ Himself declared them two thousand years ago. When I finished reading, I fell to my knees in tears. I wept so much that it was difficult to breathe. I wondered, “Is this the year of the Lord’s favor? Does that favor include being released from the torment of past emotional wounds? Does that favor mean freedom from memories that imprison our minds?” For me it was. I experienced a healing from shell shock in that place. At or near the spot where Jesus began his earthly ministry, He released me from the oppression of my wounded mind.

We visited many places in the Holy Land that seared my soul. I felt an emotional and spiritual overload while there, not in a bad way, but in a profound way. Later our group visited the war memorial of Yad Vashem, a place that deeply touched my heart and soul. It was established in 1953, less than a decade after the end of the concentration camps of WWII. Among its purposes are to serve as the world’s repository for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Jewish people who survived and perished in the Holocaust; to safeguard the memory of the past; and to interpret and pass on its meaning for future generations. While there I reflected on the people I had befriended as a teenager, survivors who had been in those camps.

One madman, Adolph Hitler, had convinced many to follow him on a path of destruction of the Jews. He was a contagious virus of hatred who set out to extinguish those he considered less than himself. Anti-Semitism has been around for all of history and that, of course, made Hitler’s rants resonate with vast populations who cheered him on as he maniacally ‘cleansed’ the world. It just baffles me that one person could be so evil and hook whole nations into following him. A single madman’s power was responsible for such unrestrained torture, horror and death! Just think how many

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